Parenting: Rules and Relationships
Behavior-based parenting techniques have enjoyed a strong following for the last several years. Less well known are the long-term disadvantages of the behavioral approaches, as well as the the relationship-based alternative that predated behavioral parenting’s popularity.
The Age of “Get Tough” Parenting
“How can I make my child to behave?” was the question that behavior-based parenting sought to answer. More specifically, how can a parent get their child to finish their dinner, clean up their room, and do their homework if they aren’t naturally inclined to do so? The answer came straight out of the psychology lab: in order to get the behavior you want, make sure that the behavior you don’t want brings unpleasant consequences (punishment) and the behavior you do want brings positive consequences (rewards). Feed a rat for pushing a button in his cage and he’ll do it more. Shock him for pushing that same button and he’ll quickly stop.
Adapting these principles to the home, “punishment” translated into time-outs and lost privileges while reinforcement morphed into verbal praise and a token economy reward system. If you’ve ever seen an episode of Nanny 911, Supernanny, or World’s Strictest Parents, then you’ve seen these techniques in action. Viewers also observe the intense commitment to consistency and follow-through demanded of the parents in order to make their children comply. Yet in the end, the parents triumph and the child behaves.
The Costs of Compliance
While behavioral approaches to parenting have been demonstrated to stop misbehavior, some experts have written about the long-term disadvantages of behavior-based parenting. According to Parent Effectiveness Training, as described by Gordon Training International and by Dr Thomas Gordon in the seminal book Parent Effectiveness Training [Amazon-US | Amazon-UK], the short-term gains of parenting by punishment and reward are offset by more subtle but long-lasting side-effects.
One of the most obvious downsides of behavioral parenting is the need to continuously deliver punishments and rewards. It’s not enough to give consequences some of the time or most of the time. Very high levels of consistency are required. This is not a problem in the lab, but for real parents with jobs, the task of being totally consistent becomes difficult if not outright impossible.
More insidious is the tendency for external rewards to erode natural or “intrinsic” motivation. Pay children to read books and they’ll read more books. But when the payments stop, these children go on to read fewer books than similar children who were never paid in the first place. In essence, the monetary reward drowned out the enjoyment of reading for reading’s sake.
Because the enforcement of rules carries such an overhead, children often learn not how to comply but how to avoid getting caught. If you’re like a lot of adults, you may recall how clueless your parents seemed during your teenage years as you navigated around the restrictions they tried in vain to enforce. Is there any reason to believe our own children are less skilled at sneaking than we were?
When rules become the dominant rationale, many of a child’s cognitive and relational skills can suffer. Rule making has the unfortunate consequence of dictating solutions. When a parent creates a rule about how siblings share toys, the children miss out on the process of solving the problem on their own. In time, the real lesson learned is that the parent has the solution to all the child’s problems and will provide it, usually when the child does something to annoy the parent. And as many parents with stay-at-home adult children can attest, these tendencies can last long into adulthood.
Because rules are frequently dictated solutions, the child may not have any idea why the parent is handing down the rule or how the child’s (mis)-behavior affects the parent. A mother’s 10 o’clock curfew might really mean “I worry about your safety and I can’t rest soundly until you’re back.” By speaking of emotions and needs, the underlying reasons for rule making come out and the possibility for creative problem-solving can emerge. The parent’s need to feel their child is safe could be met in other ways, such as spending the night at a trusted friend’s house. Children and teenagers related to in this way often remark “I didn’t understand how much my actions affected my parents.” The curfew that helps Mom sleep well at night is a lot easier to accept than the curfew handed down by fiat.
And last, but surely not least, behavioral parenting strikes at the genuine and rich relationship that is possible between parents and their children. If the major interaction between adults and children becomes one of administering regulations, then the relationship has a tendency to become an adversarial negotiation rather than a loving cooperation. When rules dominate genuine affection, adolescents and even children are at risk of “emotional divorce” from their parents. Simply put, the child stops caring what his parents think or feel. This cutoff signals the loss of an opportunity to influence a child in any other way than through rewards and punishments.
Relationship Over Rules
The central theme of Parent Effectiveness Training is that parents have the strongest and longest-lasting influence over their children (their children as a whole, not just their children’s immediate behavior) when they cultivate a genuine, loving relationship that includes empathy between parents and children and that emphasizes an understanding of the needs of all members of the family. Rules, then, becomes more about solving problems and meeting needs and less about dominance and obedience. The goal of the relation-centric approach to parenting is a young adult who is not only obedient, but is also emotionally intelligent, skilled at solving his own problems and adept at negotiating adult relationships.
3 Responses to “Parenting: Rules and Relationships”
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I totally agree. My wife is Chinese. We live in China and have a 19 months old son. Because of the “one child per family” policy in China and the rapidly-rising cost of living most parents both work and the child is raised, and frequently spoiled, by the grandparents or, more often, the grandmother. The result is what we call “The Little Emperor Syndrome” where the child is basically out of control until the school system begins to impose rules and reign in the little monster. Sometimes parents and/or grandmother will, out of sheer frustration with the “naughty” child, begin imposing punishment and reward regulations before the child reaches school age but more often it happens, if at all, after the teachers have tried to control the child in class. And of course we can see the negative effect of behavioural parenting here just as in western countries. The parents and grandparents think they are loving the child by not imposing controls or helping him develop his intrinsic motivation. Interestingly, I’ve seen primary school classes where the teacher has been a very patient, loving, caring person and the behaviour of the children has been obviously better than in classes where the teacher simply imposed rules.
My wife and I agree that we will raise our child our way, with rules that are enforced for safety but with love, explanation (even though he doesn’t yet understand all of the reasons explained), encouragement and praise. My wife’s parents live with us but we’ve made it very clear to them that our methods must be followed. So far so good. We often have comments from people about our son’s good behaviour, intelligence, and abilities, particularly intelligence which is very important to Chinese parents. We usually tell people that “he is probably no more intelligent or creative than your child. It’s just that we’ve stimulated his mind and given him a loving environment where he knows both the freedom to grow and the boundaries”
Sorry for the long comment but the article really is good and inspired me to write.
About the only way you can punish kids these days is to take them off life support. You’ve got to pull the plug.
No computer. No phone (not even land lines, if you have any). No Xbox. No Wii. No apps. No Web. No iPod, iPhone, iPad or anything else that starts with a small i.
It’s the Amish Admonishment: nothing that has a power source of any type, except maybe a lamp. You know, so they can read.
Can you imagine the poor child? Cut off from the world. Not being up-to-date on what her friends are doing every second of the day. Frantic with the worry that some viral video will become all the rage without her knowing about it. Having her avatar running around unsupervised. Virtually feeling the weight of all the e-mails and IMs building up, unable to LOL at them.
Great post. I’m cheering!